Is social media part of your marketing mix?

We all know that our friends and families influence us if they give us a recommendation…or a ‘stay away!’ …for a vendor or business. And those recommendations have proliferated in the social media sphere through sites like facebook and Yelp. But here’s something most of us don’t know. In our latest social media research, we asked consumers if they read a post or comment about a restaurant or retailer, and if they did, how influential was it in deciding whether to visit that establishment. About 60 percent of consumers said they had read a post, and 81 percent said that it influenced them on where they chose to do business.*

What’s more striking is that the numbers looked amazingly similar for vendor-generated posts. Seventy-eight percent of consumers said that those posts influenced where they chose to do business.

So your presence in social media is not just an afterthought, but should be a key part of your marketing mix.

Janet Eden-Harris /
Janet Eden-Harris is the CMO and SVP of Strategy for Market Force Information. She joined Market Force from J.D. Power and Associates, where she was VP of its Web Intelligence unit. www